Between the Grapevines

Fayza followed Farouq into a broken-down building and watched him drop onto his knees, running his hands over the ground until his fingers caught against something. She stepped back when the large metal trapdoor lifted, blowing dust around them, and revealing the dark tunnel beneath. He offered her his arm to balance as she carefully lowered herself down, her right hand still wrapped in a broken but stiff cast. Another man had stood behind them until they both dropped onto the lower floor then closed the door once again, leaving the two in pitch darkness.

Her chest tightened at the blackness and faint smell of wet dirt until her cousin switched on the flashlight he'd held, brightening the cave. They both squinted until he pointed it further down the stretching tunnels. "Before we say anything," he turned to her comfortingly. "We say God's name."

Fayza swallowed to wet her dried throat, still tasting debris and metal, when she opened her mouth to follow him. "Bismillah," she whispered. Farouq smiled sweetly down at her, the hair that sat above his lip and stretched into growing stubble over his jaw, aging her cousin. Last time she'd seen him, they had been recklessly facing the Occupational soldiers on their own, she'd been beat to the ground and his unconscious body had been dragged away then thrown into their truck.

The glisten that overcame Farouq's eyes as they watched each other confirmed that he seemed to be replaying the same scenes in his mind. Their initial, violent separation had brought them together eight years later to stand before one another in the dark tunnel, dirtied with sediment and smoke. She smiled. "Glory be to God, ya Farouq, for how He has saved you from those monsters and brought you back to us after all this time."

He pressed his lips together, tugging one corner of his mouth up in thought as he looked down at his baby cousin. "I returned less than a year after they took me, Fayza," he told her. "It is you who was brought back to us after all this time, by God's mercy."

Fayza pinched her expression, slowly nodding in agreement. "Yes, it seems that I've been the one missing all this time, then?"

Farouq nodded. "It seems so," he chuckled. "But you were not missing, Fayza. When I was freed from detainment around ten or eleven months after they'd taken me, I was only greeted by Muhsin and Amjad at the prison's doors. I asked about you... and they told me Fayza Awad had been killed in Occupational Prisons three months before."

The word chased the smile from her face. Fayza knew the soldiers might have lied to her family about her state to keep her isolated all this time, but killed? She had never imagined that they'd killed her while she sat, barely alive in their prisons, waiting for her freedom. Her heart dropped into her feet at the thought that Muhsin might have thought back to the moment they tore her away from his protection and believed it to be her last moments of life. That her mother could have lived eight years of her life believing that, after she'd lost her husband, her daughter had been killed, too. That her little brothers had grown up with the memories of a dead sister.

"How...?" She breathed. "Killed?"

"Imagine my surprise when one of their own settlers came to us, asking us to save Fayza Awad from their military hospital. Wallah, it was God who sent her to us so we could save you from their grasps," Farouq grinned, reaching forward to lightly nudge her elbow. "Behind me, behind me, Fayza. When I was taken into the Occupational Prison, you followed. When I joined the Resistance Fighters, you married one."

She flinched when he flicked her forehead with a happy chuckle. Fayza tried to smile, though her thoughts remained drained and regretful of what her family had endured because of her. Farouq, who'd known her just as well as her brother had, shone his bright light into her face until she turned away. "Don't worry anymore, Fayza. Let's take you to Muhsin."